Project: Soil Microbial Communities & Diversity

To use the basic tools and techniques of traditional and molecular microbiology

To investigate the diversity and identity of soil microorganisms in a habitat of your own choosing

To make careful, unbiased observations and to record and analyze them for meaning and importance

To design controlled experiments and collect data from those experiments to answer questions that arise from your observations

To show data in effective figures or tables

To make and articulate conclusions from experimental results

To write intelligibly in scientific research report format about your investigation and its conclusions, including its significance or implications

Introduction to the Project

In the 1980's scientists discovered that, despite microbes' invisibility to us, the microbial world is much more diverse and numerous than the macroscopic world of plants and animals. Traditional measures of diversity relied on physical traits. The use of physical traits in determing relationships between organisms has two major problems when it comes to microbes: 1) microbes are not as morphologically diverse as metazoans and their morphological traits are not indicative of evolutionary relationships and 2) there are no morphological traits common to both macroorganisms and microbes. In the 1980's Carl Woese suggested that the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences of certain common genes could be used to measure relatedness among radically different organisms. He picked the genes that encode ribosomal RNA (rRNA). Ribosomes, the protein-RNA complexes that are the scaffold on which proteins are synthesized, are common to all cells, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic. Despite differences in size, the sequences of rRNA molecules contain regions that are highly conserved, thus highly similar. Woese chose the intermediate sized rRNA molecule, 16S rRNA in prokaryotes and 18S rRNA in eukaryotes because it was large enough to contain enough information for genetic comparisons but small enough for the gene to be sequenced easily.

Comparing sequences of the gene (16S DNA) that encodes 16S rRNA in different bacteria can be used to identify them. We can also use rDNA sequencing to deduce relationships between different bacteria and among organisms as diverse as bacteria and humans. Woese's ground-breaking work altered the phylogenetic tree of life and showed that the prokaryotic world was evolutionarily much older than expected and much more important.

Recent advances in molecular tools for gene sequencing and in other types of microorganism identification dramatically expanded our knowledge of the contribution of microbes in their (and our) environment. It is estimated that 99.9% of microbes are "culturable" - that is, currently cultured by traditional methods leading to the so-called "Great Plate Count Anomaly"- that many more bacteria are visible under a microscope than appear as colonies on agar plates. Culture-independent estimates of the number of bacteria in a gram of soil are 10^9 - this is several hundred to 9,000 orders of magnitude greater than the number derived from culture-dependent methods. It has been speculated that there might be 10 billion species of bacteria on Earth!

Your goal in this semester long project is to use both culture-based and culture-independent molecular methods of bacterial identification to investigate the diversity of bacteria in soil from a Wellesley greenhouse habitat and to explore the specific role of some of the bacteria in that community.

Molecular Strategy for Identification of Culturable & Non-culturable Bacteria in a Soil Sample

Strategy for Identification of Culturable Bacteria in a Soil Sample

Links to Labs

We would like to thank Charles Deutsch, Patricia M. Steubing; Stephen C. Wagner and Robert S. Stewart, Jr.; Kyle Seifert, Amy Fenster, Judith A. Dilts, and Louise Temple; and the instructors of the Microbial Diversity Course at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, MA for their valuable assistance in the development of these labs.